My first
research for "Happy Doomsday!" was targeting the
possibility of visualising history through the dynamics of border shifts
in Europe. Installed as we are on top of 5000 years of military conflict
and territorial division through peace treaties, I was convinced that
chaotic behaviour could be extracted from there. Then I dropped on a piece
of software called "Centennia", developed by a Chicago based company
whose web site sells the product as ''used in the teaching of European
history to the US Navy officers''.

"Centennia"
indeed does provide a functional way of looking at the political map of
Europe: VCR-type interface for play/fast forward/fast backwards; zoom
in and out; and a stripe of text trying to keep up with the graphic events.
One could zap through the arcane of European conflicts and come
out unscathed by the effort. The flatness of the visuals and the minimal
interaction pattern might seem appalling - considering the subject - but
they actually build a product with some historical significance. "Centennia"
is - at the brink of a new era of militarisation as well as anti-Americanism
of Europe - a double mirror, reminding the cross Atlantic parties what
makes their marriage so difficult: *imagology*.

\= Americans(1)
are simplistic while Europeans are complicated. Americans are insensitive
and Europeans hypocrite. Americans are dominant, Europeans weak. Americans
arrogant, Europeans cynical. Americans ignorant, Europeans precious. Americans
loud, Europeans hidden. Americans take pills, Europeans smoke joints.
Americans eat junk, Europeans drink stuffs. =/ This imagological
pastiche can be played back-and-forth like "Centennia" plays history
- to no resolve. Imagology, as we know by now, is self reflexive, and
so is the military enterprise: no matter what kind of propaganda effort
wraps &the latest war&, all conflicts are unified by an
urge for gratification. That is why military history looks so repetitive,
retrospectively speaking of course. And that is why geopolitics (*GP*)
was invented: to simplify the logic behind this urge and to offer fast
argumentation for its fulfilment. What the "Centennia" cartoon is confronting
us all with is a self-centred vision on land= and history=
(actually on =matter and =time), which must submit their
behaviour to our collective fantasies. And that vision, although it is
more explicitly convergent with >>the American dream<<, is
relevant also for Europeans, Asians, Antipodeans.

Exercise:
Since the Americans' perception of Europe can not be challenged in its
simplicity, maybe ||Europeans|| should, for a change, try applying the
complicated pattern of their local *GP* to America. The obsessive
processes at play among ++the European States++ could be easily translated
to ++the United Ones++ as well. Without ignoring the different linguistic
context, one should consider maybe that the citizens of Montana and those
of (say) Georgia feel further apart from each other than the East Coasters
feel from Europe or the West Coasters from Australia, for instance. One
should also consider the long list of civil wars feeding the history and
the propaganda, but also the daily life in the !!U.S. of A. !!!! (frontier/Mafia/police/gang
wars, all categories with countless subdivisions, all opposing groups/segments
of society in a consistent stream of violence). Territorial division and
intricate conflicts - this is a familiar picture from which Europe can
dwell some compassion for its younger and Big(ger) Brother, as well as
retrieve some self-esteem(2). //end of Exercise://

Meanwhile
America is busy externalising bits of its traumas by polic(e)ing some
hot corner of the global entropy: &Civil War& vs. &Civic
War&. And #Americano-therapy# vs. %Euro-psychoanalysis%.
Those two geo-entities, linked apparently in a confused marriage, seem
to be each other's nightmare: whatever one partner loves (envies) in the
other is immediately shadowed by something it hates the most. And mutually
the other way round. But besides and beyond these couple of dilemmas lies
an unexpected harmony:

It is neither
the Americans nor the Europeans who rule the world, but @Mighty Mouse@
-the successful bastard of the two!!!! With fairy-tale
gear and cartoonish efficiency - this !!!!Ameropean child!!!! spins
the globe with his speedy magic, deleting any resistance and clicking
into action our infantile dreams about power, lust, and lack of responsibility.
Why Does Mighty Mouse RuleThe World? Because we live in a world that just
%LOVES% Mighty Mouse.

Portraying
Europe. The Euclidean Puzzle.

Software
is determinant in shaping visuals. While trying to figure out Europe (as
a geographic shape, that is) HD! stepped from the abstract
and somehow sad visions of genetic algorithms and fractal waves in the
direction of game semiotics, with happier narrative-&-content oriented
3D environments.

The map of
the continent remained a crucial element in the project, but its main
functionality was confined to the Tactical level of the game. The
continental plate was divided into separate entities, each of them following
the general outline of a specific country and situated at its respective
geographical position (Euro-map of 1998, date of HD! production).
The shapes of countries were generated by a process of simplification,
in the way puzzles are designed. Then those 2D stereotypes were extruded
into 3D boxes, to which the minimal details of a fortress wall and a concrete
grey texture were added. The countries are separated from each other by
deep trenches; filled with lava and interconnected in a maze they actually
reproduce the borderlines of Europe. The whole construction is floating
on a deep blue sea.

|Boxes\fortresses\puzzle\maze|
-Without even a preliminary calculation, Doomsday(!) Europe
was shaped along the fundamentals of modern politics: defensive systems
with offensive capabilities; entrenched positions forcing the potential
enemies into a cohesive relation. The \geometry of power= and the
progressive =disappearance of geography/ under the pressure of
political institutions.

The direct
model for the HD! map was the design of fortifications as
it developed from the 15th Century onwards, under pressure of the increasing
use of guns in both siege and defence. The star shaped forts progressively
hiding under layers of earth were actually enacting the paradoxes of modernity
itself: fractured relations between function and emotion, between symbols
and facts, between the integral calculus of artillery and the Euclidean
description of con|solid|ated spaces. And they were also enacting
a visual model of geopolitical thinking, which also happens to be a by-product
of modernism.

What
is geopolitics? [1] Sex & Karma

The ultimate
reason behind the elaborated speculations of *GP* is ||WAR||. In
a positiveperception, *GP* helps to point out the obvious
- under the many layers {economic, scientific, cultural, emotional etc.}
of {any} geo-analysis - a unique engine, where !!!!power and
fear!!!! are geared together/chase each other in a stimulus loop.
That loop is finally spinning off in ||WAR||. Along the process, *GP*
can reduce the geographic prejudices to their essential psycho analytical
ground. From there on the individual option (freedom/protection) becomes
a matter of will. As with one's own sexuality, the acknowledgement of
the dark sides connected to domination and violence could be liberating,
if so decided by the patient.

The lesser
side of the story comes when *GP* acts as a \substitute of destiny/,
reducing therefore the status of societies to a pre-determined pattern.
To extend the sexual analogy: in the negative option, when people fall
from innocence, they fall both into their death-linked sexuality and into
the prison of their geopolitical faith. From here on, no matter what happens
to the social tissue, to the individual and to the community is pre-determined,
and therefore exempt of any moral (legal?) consequence. Russians
belong to a huge & nervous country under continuous threat
from the Asian nightmare; USA are a big and lazy
power overseeing the globe from a distant position; England is
an arrogant island between Europe, the North Pole and America;
the Balkans are a mish mash of frustrated identities etc.
Belonging to a specific area by birth becomes a karmic thing, containing
its own reward or punishment, without any logic.

The
vision of Micromégas .

The main
function of the HD! tactical map, like the function of any
puzzle, is to enhance the details while keeping open the perception of
the whole, so that @the zoom-factor@ never deletes @the context-factor@
from the play. Both the user and the interface are huge and small,
comprehensive and fragmented, submissive and dominant, in an ever changing
relation. The user can keep a holistic vision of the continental maze
(the so called satellite prospective), navigate on top of it at middle
height (the balloon prospective), or land on the surface of a country,
be a part of it (the grass hopper prospective provided by the Ground
level).

That is what
happened to Gulliver's perception while he travelled from Lilliput to
Brobdingnag, with a difference that in HD! the process is
simultaneous. That is why Voltaire's hero, Micromégas, is a more appropriate
analogy here: a giant for the terrestrians and a dwarf for the inhabitants
of other planets, Micromégas is not an innocent observer and a passive
commentator who experiences his adventures as they come (Gulliver's case);
but an advised explorer of the universe, who KNOWS about and TAKES ADVANTAGE
of his ambiguous situation. Unlike Gulliver Micromégas is constantly IN-&-OUT
of his story - an essential difference.

Of course
there is a trick in HD!. What vectorial design allows to
happen is that a number of derivative scenes can be built by scaling an
initial module. The scene graph of the Tactical map is different
from the scene graphs of the countries as they appear on theGround
level, but the previous provides the modelling units for building the
latter. When navigating on the Ground level, the player
is actually hosted in a scene graph where only one country appears at
a time. Bridges positioned at the respective frontier points provide links
to the neighbouring countries/scene graphs. In this way the complete map
of Europe can be navigated virtually, but only room by room, space by
space, country by country. Due to the consistency in design, the perception
loop is closed and the user gets an almost impossible feeling of tactile
control over geographic realities.

Generated
in order to get around a hardware limitation, this solution is otherwise
also meaningful. Countries are a continuum only from the static/vertical
perception of GOD; from the horizontal perception of the inhabitant/traveller
they are closed spaces, linked only via controlled segments of space.
While playing HD! at theTactical, respectively
the Ground level, users participate in two separate processes of
identification. The Micromégas-like a priorisense of space
helps cumulating them and therefore (hopefully) understanding the emotional
essence of *GP*: its reality cannot function out of a fictional
convention, where !!!! the citizen and the user merge!!!!,
becoming the owner of a fiction (geography) and the character in a play
(politics). In other words, one cannot respond to a *GP* environment
but by being simultaneously a controller (the god of interaction) and
a symbolic property (the manipulated avatar).

What
is geopolitics? [2] The citizen and the user.

*GP*
is actually about aesthetics more than about strategy. Mapping the streams
of interests in scale politics is a cosmetic operation meant to impress
the users with an interface of logic and force. From the first attempts
to map the world to the >clean wars< of the 90's, a propaganda
machine worked relentlessly to hide the messiness of war through the harmonious
logic of $mediated geography$. There is no
causal necessity deriving from geographic co-ordinates and characteristics;
only the game scenarios imply that, in order to generate participation.
We could improvise even further by saying that #conspiracy theories
& geopolitics# are con substantial in the implication that there
is a superior order in political decision, and also an objective necessity
to support that order. While the democratic apparatus denies both domains,
it secretly relies on them for arguing the infallibility of the state.
In the follow up of this assessment one could push further the analogy
[(geo)politics=gaming] and say that *Citizenship* is an
obsolete concept, since it doesn't reflect (!!!!anymore/for a long
time already!!!!) the status quo.
*Usership* is more accurate and more comprehensive, describing
both the attitude (curious, but distant and self-absorbed), and the positioning
of the electorate with respect to the political landscape: >>in
for the entertaining/out for the responsibility!<<

L'Etat
c'est moi.[1]. The Muscles of the Animal

HD!
relies on a physically aggressive interface as well as on conflict oriented
virtual geography. Users are asked to assume as avatar an existing country
by selecting it on a touch screen; then they are asked to work out on
a fitness machine in order to increase their virtual identity by direct
muscular force. Generated by an attitude of dada-like cynicism (linking
war to muscles and politics to fitness), the overall HD!
concept evolved as an expression of the crisis confronting the zoon
polytykon which hides in the user.
Since the =political animal= is absorbed by entertainment, the
only efficient way to circulate information might be precisely by using
entertainment's channels and formats. Moreover, since media acceleration(3)
is decreasing exponentially the user's sense of participation while giving
h|e|m a fake (over)-awareness, the counter method might be connecting
physical exercise to larger topics, crediting the body as a gate
for re-accessing attention, (true) awareness, direct participation.

What
is geopolitics? [3]. Going Bananas (once)

The problem
rising as soon as one tries to attack *GP* as a domain of oppressive
prejudices is that it has (at least some) support from the side of facts.
To make myself understood, I will use as an example one of the pet metaphors
from *GP* discourses involving economic aspects: the BANANA.
The wealth belt connecting Milan to London, the crop density in the USA,
the traffic of transatlantic cargo, the draught affected areas, the drug
production and transportation, the light weaponry distribution in Eurasia,
all kind of relevant phenomena seem to organise themselves according to
a BANANA pattern. It looks too good to be true, but (social) life seems
to organise itself in a pattern reminding of a fruit vulgar by name and
obscene by shape: BANANA(4).
Belonging to one BANANA clutter or another can be of immense consequence.
Let us consider for instance a country from the opium B., say Afghanistan:
what chance is it given by geography (relief, soil, climate, neighbours)
and by history in order to reach what are considered to be the Western
standards of democracy? None, if I may be blunt; at least not for the
foreseeable future. Afghanistan, amongst others, belongs to what Mircea
Eliade used to call >>peoples under history<<,
with an identity so much oppressed that history itself seems to ignore
them.

What #statehood#
brings to these areas (where the "peoples" themselves are shifting between
ignoring history and waiting for its advent) is usually oppression, tribal
hatred, political violence, ideological/religious fundamentalism. What
those places are/could be outside of statehood depends very much on their
position within the respective banana and on its demographic density.
In the <<skinny bananas>> fragmentation can bring survival,
while agglomeration (of interests/infrastructure, resulting in statehood)
means (almost) certain collapse.

What
is geopolitics? [4]. Proteger et Punir

Turning our
attention now to the <<fat bananas>> floating on the
mainstream of history, what statehood brings there is a diminished place
for individualism in exchange for an increased space dedicated to its
administration and punishment, protection and service. Numbers of writings
(among them Foucault's "Surveiller et Punir" being a reference) emphasise
the oppressive functions of the modern state, feeding the idea of adjustments
in favour of increased individual freedom [IIF]. In one of those
strange paradigm shifts which occur without raising much questioning,
the claim for [IIF] started to be spinned into a generic argument
for neo-liberal tactics: largely the dissolution of states within the
corporate strategies of global control.

Patterns
of development along these lines seem to be already at work, and what
has been a cold war favourite subject for SF distopias {cyber-punk just
adding an edge (and a closure) to the long line of doom visions based
on global government} changed significantly during the last decade into
scientific analysis and prognosis. Political decisions at the top (Euro
currency, NATO policies), uncovering of older surveillance schemes (Echelon),
as well as the double aspect of media acceleration (freedom and control)
came to feed the debate.
What appears as surprising in the polemics between neo(right)-liberals
and (neo)left-intellectuals is the dilemmatic position of the last with
regards to the situation, position and faith of the state. Embarrassed
on one side by their own anarchist luggage (acquired in order to build
a distance from the realpolitik of Communism?) and on the other
by the nationalist discourses firing from all directions (republicans,
Catholics, royalists, Protestants, "former" communists, etc.) the critics
of the corporate offensive are neither able to define a realist alternative
to the state nor to defend it as being the lesser evil.
Of course the state has already entered the process of self demolition.
But typically for unsolved psychoanalytical conflicts, the relation of
the intellectuals with the state remains sensitive, and the present crisis
stays un-addressed.

What
is geopolitics? [5]. The Aquarius Handicap

Protection/Punishment
is a commonly known psychoanalytical couple of concepts associated with
parental care. They define the paradoxes of individual development, forever
oscillating between two fundamental needs: shelter and freedom. What the
}60's{ actually did was translated that dilemma of the family cell
into the social theatre. But the symbolic immolation of the father and
the sexual revolution did not stop at the level of individual liberation,
as it seemed for a while. The psychoanalytic resentment fashioned by the
baby boom generation as a social issue in the 60's was promoted by the
representatives of the same generation as a political strategy in the
90's. And since politics are now consistent with marketing, the same trends
can be followed into the mainstream of consumerism, pop culture, and global
policies. The ||forever young|| ideology of the 90's is the marketing
version of the \\flower power// from 30 years ago. And the neo-liberal=
doctrine is the new face of """power to the people""". A normal
(d)evolution, somehow, considering that the inhalers of the }60's{
are the political leaders of this moment.

There lie
the reasons why nobody has the instrument to address the crisis of the
state: the decision makers are accomplishing an old dream, although a
bit reshuffled. The commentators on the margin have family problems: they
cannot get back and mourn for something they learned to hate so well.

What
is geopolitics? [6]. Going Bananas (twice)

The overall
experimental aspect of this decade can be better grasped via the recurrent
scheme of the bananas. The political discourse is framing the areas of
under historical status quo (skinny bananas) from the point of
view of ""classic"" democracy, as if expecting Western-styled statehood
to be implemented and function properly where the state was mostly a sour
experience.
Symmetrically, those areas precisely where the state model proved to be
functional (fat bananas) are reshaped into a direction where tribal
fragmentation, regionalism and low intensity chaos might be the retribution
for ambitious para-state policies.
It looks like a SWAP method is put at work in order to challenge the potential
of adaptation in both types of anomalies (fat & skinny): the very
poor will get the diseases of the rich and the rich will get the fears
of the poor. Social engineering with a zest of humour.

L'Etat
c'est moi [2]. BALKAFRICA

Fouquet:
Sire, mais l'Etat...

Louis
XIV: l'Etat, c'est moi!

Assuming
*the statehood= of one's own =body* is not just an obvious
way of moralising on the issue of direct responsibility in politics and
war, but also a way of questioning those domains, their dynamics and their
borders. The over-present physical interface of HD! was
designed as an instrument of doubt, as a teaser of the institutional body
through the minimal performances of the physical one. However, a year
and a few conflicts after the project was completed, the fitness machine
metaphor gets a new edge of significance.

Exercise: If >>Balkanisation<< is the
term that made history in political-&-media language with reference
to things that turn messy somewhere in the world, what would be then the
word for coining the last 10 years of continuous mess in the Balkans proper?
AFRICANIZATION is my guess for a good replacement. Not because
it points at an area which competes (with very little success, it is true)
for the same media attention as @the Appendix of Europe@; but because
it stirs in the *user* streams of irrationality that belong actually
to its (past) fears as a +citizen+.

Africa is
a place to which any AMEROPEAN user has a special relation through
colonial guilt, racial difference and/or cultural attraction. Meanwhile,
the space of Africa is mentally accessible only with the distant abstraction
of a dark fairy tale. It has no geography except on safari areas, and
no geopolitical structure beyond the rims of urban density along the coastal
line (mainly the Mediterranean and the Cape areas). The obstinate way
in which war is waged in Africa makes politics incomprehensible, since
not instrumented with familiar tools (of which *GP* is maybe the
most important, emotionally speaking). Still, African conflicts are instructive
for the Ameropeans precisely because the only familiar reference they
get there is the physicality of the body at war. That means mutilation,
rape, massacre, displacement. Since the *GP* context is both banal
{everybody "knows" that Africa is the back yard where (super)powers play
poker with resources and ideologies} and totally obscure, the body is
finally the real hero of conflicts, their object, instrument and goal.
War in Africa is beyond any glamorous speculation, untouched by literature
and film and uninteresting for the prime time media. It is JUST war.

How do the
Ameropean users react to this different type of reality? Mainly with frustration:
there is !!!!no interaction!!!! possible in the African war game;
just masses of people, individualised by cameras only for the few seconds
needed to show some maimed limbs. People so unhappy that it makes you
angry; so constantly oppressed that you start hating them. It is just
too stupid to be one of those victims, to be constantly in the way of
violence. Hate+ and +anger are good: they pull the user
out of its status of expectation, they almost force h\e\m towards citizenship.
Almost.

In the Balkans,
like in Africa, human ordeal managed to transcend somehow
the geopolitical dimension of war. Over-intricate national conflicts are
packed in areas of density impossible to comprehend by the usual standards;
military effort is invested in the conquest of barns; orchards become
strategic areas; tactical knowledge is deployed in a family vs. family
and ÷door-to-door attrition÷. Under the circumstances, war became
again irrelevant beyond the direct involvement of the body. Once again
war proved to be so ugly and unglamorous that it looked dull, except for
the unbearable sufferings of people on all sides. Over-powered media interpretations
contributed unexpectedly to the emotional saturation {everybody "suspects"
now that ||former Yugoslavia|| is the back yard where (super)powers play
poker with resources and ideologies}. And maybe for the first time since
la Grande Guerre, war within Europe is perceived as deprived
of any objective necessity, historically speaking.
At the end of the decade AMEROPA is looking through the news screens
at BALKAFRICA with exhausted anger: victims are there all day long,
brought by a media that wants the users to feel guilty, while it conspires
to keep them impotent. //end ofExercise://

What should
be extracted from this is a total rejection of the political body, as
inefficient, selfish, and dishonest. While politics (and war) can function
only by compromise, the individual involvement in conflicts is uncompromising,
effective and irreversible. When people die, they stay dead, when they
lose their house - it is lost, when they kill their neighbours, their
environment is damaged for a generation. The AFRICANISATION of the Balkans
proved that the community is as unreliable and as dangerous as the state,
that geopolitics+ and +village politics obey the same dirty
rules, that there is no place for individuality at any level of the social
body.
As a consequence, the only way out of this crisis is the self-extraction
of the individual from the interfaces of historical determinism.
The HD! interface should be understood in the end not as
a means for working out the relation with the institutions of war, but
as an exercise in dissent and rejection of all institution,
as far as they interfere with the integrity of the body.

Notes:

(1)
As stated
by Alfredo Jaar already years ago, AMERICA== is an abusive term, wrongly
used by many in order to designate the ==USA. For the speed factor and
for reasons of style, I do the same here.

(2)
For the #rape mentality# underlining the European myth see my text ||Computer
Game Europa|| in "Related Issues" (editor Christian Kravagna), published
in the framework of the "complexul muzeal" exhibition (1997).

(3)
See my essay about ''Media Acceleration'' in "MEDIA REVOLUTION"- an anthology
to be published this year by the Bauhaus Dessau Stiftung and Campus Verlag.

(4) From Banana
Yoshimoto to the recent USA vs. Europe "Banana War", from the Warholian
gallery sign to the obsession of Eastern European immigrants (Romanian
and Russian mainly) have with this food, the presence of the banana in
our lives takes delirious dimensions. Not to forget the >>Banana
republics<< - a cute concept used for describing the Central American
democracies in the *GP* of the 70's.